Measuring Rita's Force -- 3 Eyeswalls??

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This article was in the Beaumont Enterprise:





Jennifer Reynolds/The Enterprise

Crews began cleanup Friday, September 30, at the Target in Beaumont after the roof of the newly renovated store collapsed during Hurricane Rita.

As Southeast Texas communities continue cleaning up the destruction left by Hurricane Rita two weeks ago, weather watchers sift through data about wind speeds, barometric pressure and the like to determine exactly how powerful this powerful storm was.

Roger Erickson, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, La., said the hurricane had not one, but three eye walls packing tornadic winds.

Erickson described the innermost eye wall, which hit parts of Orange and Newton counties, as five to 10 miles across. The second was 20 to 40 miles across and pounded Beaumont and Jasper. The largest, at about 80 miles across, hit all of Southeast Texas, Erickson said.

Each of the eye walls brought a five-mile-deep band of intense winds up to 20 miles stronger than elsewhere in the hurricane, Erickson said. Gusts in the storm, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, hit 120 mph.

As devastating as the storm was, it would have been much worse for Southeast Texas if it had not made a last-minute northeastern turn.

"We were looking at water getting into Beaumont and large parts of downtown Orange," Erickson said by telephone.

Frank Lepore at the National Hurricane Center said scientists there will study Hurricane Rita and issue a report, as they do with each tropical cyclone that attacks the U.S. coast. Studies so far have been sandwiched between monitoring the still-active hurricane season, which runs to Nov. 30.

A full report on the hurricane that ripped through Southeast Texas on Sept. 24 could be further delayed because the same person is handling it and Hurricane Katrina, which struck Louisiana and Mississippi not quite a month earlier.

In both storms, damaging winds took out many of the monitoring instruments the scientists use, Lepore said by telephone.

"They have to go in and do essentially forensic meteorology, look at houses that have not been completely destroyed," Lepore said. "It takes a while to do all that."

With the gauges that remained, the National Weather Service found a peak gust of 105 mph at Southeast Texas Regional Airport at 3:47 a.m. the day Rita hit, according to a preliminary report by Erickson and his Lake Charles colleagues.

One meter in Sabine Pass showed gusts of 99 mph at 2 a.m., and another registered maximum winds of 81 mph before it broke.

The report showed a storm surge of 5 to 10 feet in Sabine Pass and minimal flooding of 1 to 2 feet near the Sabine River in Orange.

The hurricane dumped nearly 9 inches of rain at Southeast Texas Regional Airport in the 48 hours ending at 1 a.m. Sept. 25, the report shows.

Felix Navejar, another meteorologist with the weather service's Lake Charles office, noted that the federal agency issued tornado warnings for the eye wall area covering a span of more than 50 miles.

Anyone who thought they heard tornadoes as the storm made landfall was not alone.

"I heard it, too. It was a constant wind and rain moving across the roof," Navejar said by telephone. "It's a constant sound like a freight train."

Navejar and his colleagues rode out the storm in their office. They have power there now, but most remained without electricity at home late last week.

Navejar said two things about Hurricane Rita seemed unusual - its size and its duration.

The storm spread tropical storm and hurricane force winds 175 miles wide, wrecking Southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. And it didn't stop. The storm's winds started on Friday and kept going until Sunday afternoon, Navejar said.

"We're just lucky the thing didn't devastate every home," Navejar said.